Wednesday, April 30, 2014

The blog is on a break right now, but for today, see some images and music commemorating the end of the Vietnam War, 39 years ago on 30 April 1975. This day is celebrated in Vietnam as Liberation Day or Reunification Day to mark when Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops captured Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) from the South Vietnamese and the Americans.

Views of the war, also known as the Second Indochina War (1956-1975), are skewed by the fact that it stands at the crossroads of a huge counter-cultural revolution in the west. For the American government, participation was part of a strategy to contain Communist states. But the more complex causes of the war involved local Asian and anti-French conflicts exploding after the post-World-War-II revival, and subsequent collapse, of French Indochina in the First Indochina War (1946-1954).